


Good King Wenceslaus Looked Out, On the Feast of Stephen

by strix_alba



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Christmas, Crossover, Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-12
Updated: 2012-07-12
Packaged: 2017-11-09 20:43:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/458179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strix_alba/pseuds/strix_alba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which there is a Christmas party, the Doctor wears a Santa hat, and Molly Hooper saves the day. Possibly minor spoilers for the end of Series 6 of Doctor Who and Series 2 of Sherlock.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Good King Wenceslaus Looked Out, On the Feast of Stephen

Sherlock and John host a party on Christmas Eve. It is both an ordinary Christmas party, and a sort of … well, John thinks the right word is ‘peace offering’, even if no one calls it that aloud. Sherlock will follow the rules for acceptable interpersonal behavior that John tacked above the fireplace, as an apology for pulling a three-year disappearing act; Lestrade and Sally will attend and bring the champagne, as a way to tacitly make up for doubting him. (Anderson and his wife declined the invitation that John felt obligated to offer; John suspects that Sally is only along as an excuse to search the flat for drugs and check up on John’s mental health now that he’s back with Sherlock.) It was also supposed to be a thank-you for Molly (Sherlock’s idea, strangely enough) because if he was going to try to be a decent human being to a lot of people, he might as well get it all over with at once, but when John called Molly, she responded to the invitation with a nebulous ‘I’ll try’ followed by a peculiar crackling sound and then an ‘I’ve got to go — sorry, it’s lovely to hear from you, John. I’m happy for you.’ 

Sherlock makes it halfway through the evening before Mrs. Hudson starts wringing her hands over his attempts at non-insulting conversation, whereupon John steals Sherlock’s violin from his room and thrusts it upon him as a means of distraction. When he’s not scraping at the strings to punctuate some clever remark, he’s very good at it, and can sometimes be persuaded to play tunes recognizable to someone besides himself. Sherlock pretends to protest, but John can tell that he’s secretly pleased by the attention that it bestows upon him. He stands at the window for dramatic effect, looking over the snowy street while Mrs. Hudson regales Sally with a story about her late husband, and Lestrade tries to shut up his inner policeman just for this evening in order to not wince his way through the tale, and Harry sits on the couch with John and a glass of fruit juice in her hand instead of champagne, and John himself watches the way Sherlock’s fingers fly on the neck of the violin. 

Harry starts everyone singing when he begins to play Good King Wenceslaus, which makes John warmer than any Yule log: five years ago, and she would have had to be completely plastered before trying to lead a group of strangers in more-or-less harmony. It isn’t until the second verse that it begins to take with everyone, but take it does, and Sherlock is smirking to himself, and it’s all going so smoothly in spite of the mismatched assortment of people in the room that John actually begins to worry. This is what comes of moving in with Sherlock straight after coming back from Afghanistan, he thinks with a sigh; he never learned to let his guard down, even in civilian situations, because it never ended up being really safe to do so. Plus he’s around two members of the police force and a recovering alcoholic, of course he’s going to expect things to go to hell any second. But this is unreasonable, he tells himself. After the last two miserable Christmases that he’d had, he is entitled to sit in his own home, with his family and friends and just be happy for an evening. That’s normal.

Still, it comes as almost a relief when Sherlock breaks off mid-note during a dramatic rendition of Auld Lang Syne with an equally dramatic swish of his bow. He sets the violin down on the desk and opens the window a crack; as everyone else in the room stops singing, they can hear sounds like someone setting off a series of potato cannons, followed by shouting and laughter.

‘What is it?’ John gets up, elbowing him aside to see what’s going on down below. It’s nighttime, and snowing lightly, but the street is lit by lamp posts and Christmas lights, so he can see general shapes. Or rather: one very large shape, outlined black against the snow. A cold draft hits his hands where they grip the windowsill for balance when he sees — something that looks like, anyway, but it can’t be — no, yes, that is an eight-foot long ... model ... spaceship ... flying along Baker Street at about waist level. He can just barely make out rows of tiny windows near the top as it flies past the building, lit from within by bright green lights that casts odd shadows on the falling snow.

‘Interesting,’ says Sherlock. He pushes off from the window and makes a beeline for the door, grabbing his coat and scarf without regard for the three other coats that slide off the rack in his wake. 

‘Has someone been shot?’ asks Mrs. Hudson with great interest. Harry’s eyes widen.

‘No, no I don’t think so,’ says John. ‘It’s, um, I have no idea actually, hold on a tic.’ Down below, two dark figures — one with a short ponytail, the other wearing a Santa hat — go running past on either side of the street, holding what looks like a fishing net stretched across the width of the street while they shout to each other. John tenses; what the hell are they playing at?

‘They can just fly over it, can’t they?’ shouts the shorter of the two, in a voice that should be familiar.

‘Not while they’re this size, the thermonuclear reactor would melt if they tried to feed the engines that much power. The casing’s too thin,’ shouts the man in the Santa hat from across the street. John hears the potato-cannon noise again, coming closer. He’s not stupid, he can put two and two together: there are a couple of lunatics, out on Christmas Eve, trying to catch a — a hovercraft of some kind, some sort of military experiment gone awry — with something that looks like it couldn’t even restrain a kitten. 

‘I don’t believe it,’ says Lestrade over his shoulder, making him jump.

‘Me neither,’ says John as he runs out after Sherlock. He tries to sort through the pile of coats, gives up, and grabs someone’s dark green scarf instead. Behind him, he can hear Harry asking if they’re all about to be murdered, and Sally reassuring her that no, not if she stays put, they’ll have to get through Lestrade, John, Sherlock and herself before that happens. John shakes his head and takes back what he thought about it being too normal of an evening.

He nearly bangs straight into Sherlock coming out of the front door; he’d halted just on the stoop, shielding his eyes against the falling snow and watching. Directly in front of them are the two figures he’d seen from above, and John feels a jolt in his stomach as he recognizes the closer one as Molly Hooper. Minus the long white coat, and smelling faintly of burnt hair — half of her ponytail is missing. She glances sideways at them and smiles.

‘Hi Sherlock! Hi. John. Can you, it would be good if you’d just duck inside for a moment, for your own good,’ she says. The _poom_ -pause- _poom_ -pause- _poom_ noise increases so as to be nearly deafening; John’s breath hitches with memories of summer in Afghanistan, guns firing around him, people shouting and adding to the confusion. He presses his hands to his head and squeezes his eyes shut, reminding himself that this is England, and this is winter, and he is on the steps of his flat with Sherlock Holmes. A hand gripping his elbow pulls him to the side, and he opens his eyes in time to see the strange, oversized vehicle come zooming down the street again. He is back in England, there is snow on his eyelashes, and Sherlock has dragged him into the doorway. There, flanked by Lestrade, Sally, and Harry, wearing various degrees of mismatched outerwear, they watch the scene unfolding on the street.

Molly braces herself, and on the opposite sidewalk, her companion does the same, holding the fishing net spread out as high as they can. The spaceship — no, it’s _not_ a spaceship, spaceships don’t happen and they’re not that small — flashes past their door with more puttering and whining. When it catches the net, it drags Molly and her companion backwards a few feet, then comes to an impossibly quick halt. It hovers in the air, making a humming noise within the fishing net that shimmers against the black skin of the ship.

The man on the other side of the street shouts joyfully. He runs to meet Molly at the center of the road and join the two ends of the net together. He passes Molly four round blue devices the size of apples, and as John watches in disbelief, she attaches them to the open edges of the net. Although small, they seem to serve as some kind of weight; when she finishes, the not-spaceship sinks down softly into the snow, and the blue devices start to pulse. John could swear they look smug, even though they’re just ... electronics, or something close to that, anyway. Molly and her companion do a small victory dance, which consists of a lot of waving their hands at each other and jumping on the spot. John can only tilt his head and watch.

Sherlock walks out the door again, leaving a sudden gust of cold air where he had been shielding John from the elements. John follows. He thinks that if there’s anyone who can pull off making a dramatic entrance after having just been relegated to the sidelines by a pint-sized spaceship and blue glowey devices, it’s Sherlock, but as it turns out, he’s wrong: Molly’s odd, gangly companion ignores him completely in favor of marching up to the front end of the spaceship and lecturing it like a parent might lecture a sullen teenager.

‘Now that I’ve got your attention, do you think we could maybe have a little chat? You know, without the whole colonizing the planet thing, because really. Really? I know, I know — longest night of the year, it’s all very symbolic, but does anyone actually read the _Encyclopedia_? I know it’s been published by your time.’

From the top of the spaceship, a small, telescopic speaker emerges. Sherlock mutters something vaguely French under his breath. The noise that emerges from the speakers sounds like anything but. John covers his ears; at the corner of his vision, he sees Sally and Lestrade do the same.

The man in the Santa hat throws up his hands. ‘Well of course, there’s your problem, you can’t take the _Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy_ seriously if you’re going to _invade a planet_. And anyway, the correspondent for Earth never met me.’ He grins and adjusts his jacket.

The spaceship-speakers garble something back that sounds like ‘Xhl’tr‼khtkjtrz*pcr#kt.’ It manages to sound fairly insulting to John’s ears.

‘Yeah, but I like this planet! I’ve got family. And anyway, it’s not just me you’re offending, this planet is a level five established whatchamacallit, you can’t just go around invading it whenever you feel like.’

Molly folds her arms and looks over her shoulder at the front steps of 221. ‘It’s good to see you all,’ she says, her voice pitched a little higher than normal and her eyes fixed on the man standing just in front of John. Of course. John braces himself.

‘Extraterrestrials,’ says Sherlock.

She smiles apologetically.

‘I’m sorry about your home planet,’ says the man to the spaceship. ‘But that’s like me saying ‘Nah, I don’t feel like cleaning house, or even hiring a housekeeper, I’m just going to kick my neighbors out of theirs. It’s not polite. Especially when there’s a lovely planet, uninhabited, practically next door. It’s not quite finished cooking yet, you may need to do a bit of terraforming, but trust me. You’d be much better off putting in the effort there.’ He puts his hands behind his head and smiles in a way that unnerves John. It takes a moment to figure out why, because it’s a very different sort of smile than Sherlock’s brand of unnerving: when Sherlock smiles, it _looks_ like he’s a sociopath with no idea how to operate the correct facial muscles. When this man smiles, it’s obvious that he means it, very sincerely, and that he will very sincerely wreak deadly havoc at a later date if he does not get the results he wants.

John spares a moment from the sheer improbability of the situation to be very, very worried about Molly’s taste in men.

The spaceship screeches and sputters at him some more, and Molly edges around it to say something in a low voice to the man in the Santa hat.

‘What do you get off him?’ John asks Sherlock, rather than try any further character deductions himself. 

‘Hm? Oh, he's an alien too.’

‘What?’

‘Alien. Look at the way he carries himself, look at his _clothes_ for god’s sake, that’s not the style or the mannerisms of a young man, which ordinarily would leave two options: he is either very well-preserved, or a very fine actor. However, given that we are currently witnessing what appears to be a failed alien invasion, stopped with similarly alien technology, we must consider a third option, which is that he is in fact a second species of alien. Why would an alien species look like a human, you ask, I thought that only showed up in science fiction movies for budget reasons, and in that you would be correct; however, I am given to understand that it is a vast universe, and the probability of other humanoid life, though infinitesimally small, is still greater than zero.'

(‘Yeah, Gliese 581 g. Twenty-odd lightyears away, you’d be there by Christmas Day,’ says the alien.)

‘But that’s impossible,’ says John, because his mouth sometimes takes a moment to catch up to his brain.

‘Not impossible, merely improbable. We’ll find out soon enough.’

John can feel a headache coming on, a combination of champagne and life as he knows it crumbling around him in the form of Molly Hooper bending over to talk to the very tiny iridescent lemur that climbs out of the roof of the spaceship. He leaves Sherlock standing on the sidewalk and approaches the spaceship cautiously. Molly looks up at him and smiles.

‘That’s a, um ...’ he asks.

‘Class Eta Battleship. Apparently,’ she adds, with a glance at the man standing behind her. ‘I don’t really understand it — no, that’s not true,’ she corrects herself with a small, self-deprecating smile. ‘I understand more than you do, and more than he does.’ Her eyes flicker to Sherlock. ‘I meant to come to the party, really. We just got a little sidetracked.’

The man behind her snorts. ‘Ha! Just a little. Say, do you think you could help us with something?’ he asks.

John looks him up and down. Yeah, he can kind of see where Sherlock was coming from with the outfit thing. ‘Are you really an alien?’ he asks.

‘Well I suppose, if you want to put it that way. It’s a bit ethnocentric, don’t you think? I’m the Doctor, I’m a Time Lord. Happy Christmas! Love the jumper.’ He beams like an overexcited puppy, if a puppy were to wear suspenders that they snapped with their thumbs.

‘Thanks,’ says John. It occurs to him to wonder if he just got hit on by an alien.

‘Um ...’ Molly interrupts to gesture down at the spaceship. The lemur-alien and the speaker both sink back into the top, leaving it smooth once more save for a light dusting of snow overtop the fishing net.

The Doctor claps his hands together. ‘Right! Hello, humans!’ he says to the group on the steps. The face that Sherlock makes has to be seen to be believed. ‘So! My companion and I have just saved the world from a rather malignant brand of colonization — again. You’re welcome. Unfortunately, we’ve grounded their ship, so to speak, and I need to get it back to my own ship in order to set it back into outer space before we turn everyone back to their proper size. I don’t trust them to fly themselves there without taking off again, and that would put a bit of a damper on things. Would any of you lot mind helping us drag this thing a block or two?’

Mad. He is completely mad. Everyone is mad. Next Christmas, John is going to arrange for something manageably disastrous to happen; that way, at least he knows that to expect. That way, he won’t find himself trudging through six inches of snow with two members of the police force, a mortician, a self-proclaimed sociopath, an alien, and his older sister, attempting to haul a miniature spaceship to an apparently even bigger spaceship parked ‘just around the corner’ while Molly fends off Sherlock’s questions and explains that she wasn’t quick enough to dodge a laser beam half an hour ago and that’s why she burned her hair, it wasn’t a stylistic choice so he can stop telling her it looks like she’s trying too hard to cultivate the image of a rugged explorer. Lestrade tells her that it suits her, and she gives him a smile that is more alive and confident than John remembers.

John thinks that the weirdness quotient for the evening tops off right about the point at which they round the corner where the Doctor swears he has a spaceship, and are confronted by a blue police box instead. The Doctor lets go of their burden with one hand to snap his fingers, and the doors open. Then John has to reevaluate his scale of weirdness, because inside the police box is the main deck of a spaceship that looks like the love child of Antoni Gaudi and Charles Babbage. Beside him, Sally swears softly. 

With a not-inconsiderable amount of difficulty, they drag the spaceship inside the police box. It makes an unpleasant scraping noise as it exits the snow and enters the hard floor, and it’s a bit of a tight squeeze getting it through the door. At one point, Molly has to climb over the ship to get inside the police box and pick up her end again, and Harry nearly loses her fingers to the door frame when the Doctor gets ambitious and pulls too hard on the end. But eventually it gets inside, and to John’s amazement, there are seven people standing inside a single room twice the size of 221 Baker Street. The Doctor abandons them as soon as it’s done and runs off to the central set of controls, leaving them all staring at each other over the glossy black surface of the spaceship. Harry has both hands over her mouth, and her eyes are wide; Sherlock is making his ‘someone here is cleverer than me, and I don’t like it’ face, which John has only ever before seen in the same room as Mycroft. Lestrade simply looks confused. Molly beams at the spaceship like it’s a present.

Oblivious to this, the Doctor calls from the controls, ‘I’ll just put in the coordinates and let them off somewhere in the asteroid belt. Molly?’

She turns away from the silent staring contest that Sherlock appears to be trying to initiate. ‘I’ll be right here when you’re done. I bought ... um ...’ Her face, already pink from the cold, turns pinker. ‘When we were on Alaalu, I bought presents, for you and your family. They’re still in my room. Do you think you could give them, for me?’

John didn’t think it was possible for the Doctor to smile any more hugely than he already was, but again, tonight is a night of shattering assumptions. Molly flaps her hands at John and his friends, shooing them out of the police box ahead of her. Sherlock protests, as he is much more interested in observing the control panel; John nods at Lestrade, and as Sherlock tries to walk past Molly, he and Lestrade each seize one arm and drag him out of there by force. The doors shut behind them of their own accord, and the box makes a wheezing noise that has John jumping back with surprise. It then proceeds to fade in and out of visibility, until it vanishes. He puts his hand out, but it just isn’t there anymore.

Sherlock tilts his head. Lestrade’s mouth hangs open, and John realizes that he is wearing a similar expression. He shuts his mouth and tries to pretend that he doesn’t feel like sitting down, right there in the snow, until the universe starts to make sense again. Sally has her arms crossed and tucked against her body like it will protect her from acknowledging that anything went on out of the ordinary, but John saw the way her face lit up when they were standing inside the ship. Molly looks a little embarrassed. For a few seconds, the snow falls in silence.

‘Did that just happen?’ asks Lestrade.

‘God, I hope so,’ says Sally. ‘Else I really need a holiday.’

Harry stretches. ‘My shoulders are telling me it did. We ought to get medals for assisting in matters of planetwide security, or … something.’

‘Shall we, um, go back inside then?’ John asks, when it becomes apparent that nothing else is going to happen. It feels a little anticlimactic, going back to their party and opening presents making conversation, but such is life. There are always the boring bits after something really exciting has happened; they usually involve going to the police station and helping fudge reports to make it seem like they assisted the police in an entirely legal way, though in this case John can’t imagine that there’s going to be any reports filed at all. Truth be told, he would probably be a nervous wreck without those parts, if only because they usually mean that Sherlock is still riding the high of a case that’s just finished, and hasn’t gotten bored enough yet to pose a danger to himself and his immediate surroundings, so John gets a bit of a break. He wonders if this counts as a case, or if Sherlock will spend the rest of the evening being insufferable because he didn’t get to single-handedly save anyone this time.

‘I still have questions,’ Sherlock says to Molly as they all make their way back to 221B, which just about answers that. He can make out Mrs. Hudson’s figure, standing on the doorstep and waiting for their return — for all she’d insisted on helping, they had all insisted even more strongly that she not strain her hip any more than was necessary.

‘Questions you can’t answer on your own. That’s new,’ says Molly, with a wry smile just barely visible under the street lamps. John chuckles.

‘You’ve aged four years and two months in the last three and one, and you've been traveling with a man who is neither a boyfriend nor a relative. Obviously I’m going to be interested.’

‘Well,’ she says. ‘Do you remember when everyone was saying that it was the zombie apocalypse in Australia, last year?’

‘I read about it. A lot of cultish nonsense, outside of my area of interest.’

‘And then a few days later, there were those brilliant northern lights,’ says Molly dreamily.

John looks up at the sky at the memory, and gets a snowflake in the eye for his pains. ‘Yeah, I remember that,’ he says.

‘Good.’ She turns on the stoop and bounces on her heels, a mischievous smile on her lips. ‘That might have been partially my fault.’

END

**Author's Note:**

> It's the middle of July and smotheringly hot, so now is of course the time to edit a Christmas fic I wrote way back in January.
> 
> In my head, Doctor Who, Sherlock, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Young Wizards all take place in more or less the same universe.


End file.
